Are There Three Republicans Who Put Country Ahead of Party?

U.S. Senate

The last post looked at the impeding constitutional crisis that Donald Trump is likely to trigger if he tries to fire Special Prosecutor, Robert Mueller, who it seems increasingly is focusing in on the root cause of the Trump campaign's willingness to collude with Russia: illegal financial transactions with Russians and likely money laundering. Trump and his family are all most likely involved as is Jared Kushner and a number of Trump cronies. As conservative columnist Jennifer Rubin notes in a column, "Why would he [Trump] do those things unless there was something really, really bad to find?"  You simply do not slander and undermine a special prosecutor and consider pardon powers if there is nothing to be found. In this situation, it will take three Republican senators to join with Democrat senators to stop Trump's demolition of the rule of law.  A piece in The Atlantic ponders whether and who those senators could be.  Will they put the nation ahead of their political party.  Here are article excerpts:

By midnight on July 20, 2017, it seemed increasingly likely that Donald Trump will fire the special counsel, Robert Mueller.

Mueller embodies what is admirable in U.S. public service: a wounded and decorated Marine Corps veteran of Vietnam, longtime prosecutor and U.S. Attorney under both Republican and Democratic presidents, 12-year director of the FBI under both George W. Bush and Barack Obama, unconnected to scandal or partisan suspicions at any point.

Donald Trump embodies the reverse.

Yet for now Trump has the legal power, directly or indirectly, to dismiss Mueller, if the investigation gets too close to Trump’s obviously sensitive financial concerns. And Trump himself, unaware of history and oblivious to rules, norms, and constraints, has given every indication that this will be his next step.

What happens then? Brian Beutler, of the New Republic, has just put up a bleak scenario, arguing that there really are no guardrails—or, as we observed in Mitch McConnell’s unprecedented stonewalling of a Supreme Court nomination, that the constitutional system’s real protections have been norms rather than formal rules. Someone unconcerned by those norms—McConnell last year, Trump now—can in fact blast right through them. “At the moment there are no reliable sources of accountability,” Beutler writes. “None.”

There are 52 Americans who have it within their power to prove that dark assessment wrong. Really, it would take a subset of just three of those 52. With the 52-48 current party lineup in the U.S. Senate, a switch of three votes of conscience is all it would take to have this branch of government fulfill its checks-and-balances function.

With three votes, a Senate majority could issue subpoenas and compel sworn testimony from Administration officials. It could empower its own thorough investigation, even re-hiring Robert Mueller to lead it. It could compel Donald Trump to release the tax returns about which he is so evidently nervous. It could act as if America in fact possessed a system of rule-of-law, rather than whim-of-one-man.

Ben Sasse could be one of those three, if he were willing to back up his lectures and essays about ethical public life. Lindsey Graham could, since he and John McCain have kept making the case about Trump’s recklessness. Chuck Grassley, who would be 89 years old the next time he’d have to face the voters. Dean Heller, who is in trouble anyway in a state Hillary Clinton carried, and whom Trump demeans and insults. Rob Portman, who has served in “normal” Republican administrations and could ally himself with his state’s governor, John Kasich, as forces for a principled future GOP. Jeff Flake, who in speeches has positioned himself with appeals to a more moderate politics, and who could take up the Maverick mantle of his colleague John McCain. Of course, McCain himself. Lisa Murkowski, who originally won without Republican Party support. Susan Collins, who drew a line at the rushed health-care bill. Richard Burr, who has made more-or-less common cause with his Democratic colleague Mark Warner on the Senate intelligence committee. Ron Johnson, who has just won re-election  and appears to be mad at Trump. Rand Paul, also just elected, if he believed his radical limited-government pitch. Ted Cruz, if he had the courage of his anti-Trump stand at last year’s GOP convention. Even—let’s imagine here—the likes of Tom Cotton, if he were willing to roll the dice and elevate himself as a national figure, for the post-Trump leadership contest against the likes of Sasse, Cruz, and the rest. There are half a dozen other conceivable candidates.

It would take only three. Some—Grassley? Heller? McCain if he is able to vote?—might think: What do they have to lose? They might as well wind up with dignity. Others—Paul, Burr, Johnson, Murkowski—are so far away from re-election that a lot will happen in the meantime. And all of them are senators, part of a body self-consciously proud of its independence, its individual judgment, its role in defending the long-term principles of governance.

A country of 300-plus million people, with the world’s largest economy and most powerful military, should not rely for its orderly stability on the decisions-of-conscience of just three people. But the United States may soon be in that situation. These names will go down in history, depending on the choices they make.  

Sadly, the morality of Republican senators is not what it was back in the Watergate era. Be very afraid.

Why Defeating Donald Trump Isn't Enough

GOP's Barbara Comstock - political whore to Donald Trump

In less than two weeks, Democrats and decent minded people have an opportunity to send a loud and clear message of what America is really about and what our values consist of.  Yes, Donald Trump needs to be sent to an ignominious defeat, but so too must many Republican office holders who have been complicit in his misogyny through either their endorsements of the man or by their refusal to condemn both Trump and his policies of hate and division, not to mention his crude mindset that celebrates the sexual assault of women by disgusting men like himself.  This is  election is an opportunity to stand up for morality and decency, something utterly lacking in Donald Trump and in those who have put their political party ahead of the nation and the morality that Republicans falsely claim to uphold.  Those without the moral courage to condemn Trump and/or who continue to endorse him need to be sent into political retirement.  A column in the Washington Post makes this case:

It is a message Democrats will be sending in suburban precincts all over the United States during the 2016 campaign’s final days: Defeating Donald Trump isn’t enough. Fully rejecting Trumpism also means routing Republican House and Senate candidates who showed any ambivalence in pushing back against a nominee that so many upscale voters regard with horror.

Rudra Kapila, a Democratic organizer, explained the mission . . . . “is to get folks to vote Democrat down the ballot.”

It’s an objective that really matters in Virginia’s 10th Congressional District, where Republican incumbent Barbara Comstock faces Democrat LuAnn Bennett in one of the most closely contested House races in the country. If Democrats are to have any chance of gaining the 30 seats they need to take over the House — a long shot still — they have to win in places like this, where Hillary Clinton is expected to enjoy large margins.

Comstock, a staunch conservative and longtime Clinton critic, is well aware that Trump is poison for many of her constituents. . . . . it took Comstock far too long to get to that point [of denouncing Trump]. “My question to her is: Where have you been? Why now and not before?” Bennett said in an interview after she greeted the volunteers. “She has been one of the many, many enablers of Donald Trump. She spent most of this presidential campaign dancing on the head of a pin.”

Many vulnerable suburban Republican candidates have waltzed around Trump because they need votes both from his supporters and also from independents and Republicans who loathe him. 

Many of the more rural and working-class districts that were friendly to Democrats when the party took back the House in 2006 are now reliably Republican. Democrats have moved their hopes up the class scale and further into the suburbs.

By making even more highly educated, metropolitan and ethnically heterogeneous seats competitive, Trump is speeding up a political transition that was already underway. It will be a problem for Republicans in the longer run, even if they hang on to the House this year, as a more diverse electorate and a new generation that is primarily moderate or progressive comes to predominate in more districts.

The Trump effect has already improved the Democrats’ chances of taking the Senate. In the House, they are now on track to add about a dozen seats, and pickups in the high teens or low 20s are quite possible.
 Virginia’s Bennett sees Trump creating a “lose-lose” situation for her opponent. That’s why she and scores of other Democrats will not let voters forget the name that sits, like a very heavy weight, at the top of the Republican ticket.